Doesn’t a forest tie up the carbon in live trees? A mature forest will be more or less carbon neural but a certain amount of carbon won’t be available to the atmosphere.
The trees will die eventually. The problem is that we've released a lot of CO2 from trees that died millions of years ago.[0]
If you want to get that out of the atmosphere, it's not good enough to grow trees today because in 50-100 years (or whenever a tree dies) you're right back where we are today.
but wood burns so much more dirtier than coal, and leaves much more uncombusted remains that then have to clean.
The problem is energy (or lack thereof) - and so why not solve it directly by adding ever larger sources of renewables, which eventually will becomes enough that there's no need to burn any fossil fuels!
Is that so? Even when ground fine and with enough oxygen? For local heating, I heard good things about the efficiency and cleanliness of wood pellet heaters.
Did you hear those things from either people trying to sell you a wood pellet burner, or people who've just spent a lot of money money on a wood pellet burner?
And you can add it to soil where it works wonderfully at increasing biomass, reducing water runoff and increasing the number and variety of microorganisms in the soil, sequestering more carbon.
Building houses is great, but if you're growing the trees in order to sequestrate carbon, you'd better be reasonably sure a decent proportion of the wood doesn't release it's carbon within the next fifty years. I don't live in a country where wood is a major building material, but I'm imagining that most wood that goes into building gets discarded within a few decades and ends up decomposing or being burnt.
If treated and maintained right it can last hundreds of years. So this is not really an issue and if you replace it with new wood it will still store carbon.
> if you replace it with new wood it will still store carbon.
Good point, although you need to be sure you aren't counting the wood you replace it with as more carbon storage. Every wooden house essentially provides a fixed amount of carbon storage, no matter how much of it is replaced, and only as long as it stands.
Of course you're not getting skyscrapers from them but nowadays you can build at least five floors which is not that bad. Most buildings are below that I think.
We need to unburn roughly as much coal as we've burned. We're talking about hundreds of billions of tons. You could probably plaster the whole surface of the planet with homes and not have used enough wood.
Scorched timber can last a hundred years. I have seen a cabin from 1740 made of timber from trees that were scorched in a forest fire but remained alive.
